Summer vacation. No one really knows who is more excited for summer vacation—the teachers or students. While it’s nearly impossible for our middle schoolers to hide their joy as the end of May rolls around, as teachers, we get pretty excited, too. Last summer, we were especially eager for June to arrive, but not because of what you would think. We weren’t headed on a relaxing girls beach trip with sun and our feet up. Instead, this girls trip would take us to Savannah, Georgia, to a School Climate Conference with a focus on Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS).
According to pbis.org, “PBIS is an evidence-based, tiered framework for supporting students’ behavioral, academic, social, emotional, and mental health.” It’s a three-tiered framework that focuses on the idea of clear and consistent expectations having the power to prevent problem behaviors, while at the same time focusing on the reinforcement of positive choices to create an overall warm and inviting learning community.
At the heart of this framework is the belief that when expectations are clearly stated and explicitly taught consistently, the majority of students will be able to follow them. In simpler terms , students need to be taught how to behave—even if they’ve been taught before, even if it was just yesterday.
While at the conference, we had the opportunity to not only listen and learn from the presenters but were (gratefully) given time to create the necessary materials to implement this in our building. Our College View Academy team was already familiar with PBIS, but now we had a cohesive plan that we could share with the rest of our team.
Because we are the CVA Eagles, our team decided on the school-wide acronym: SOAR, which stands for Safe, On Task, Appropriate, and Respectful/Responsible. You will find these common expectations on our SOAR posters throughout the school, reminding our students what CVA Eagles exemplify in each scenario. It doesn’t matter if students are on the playground, in the classroom, or in an assembly—they know what to do!
One of our favorite parts is the SOAR ticket we hand out to students when we see them exemplifying positive behaviors. We all have collection containers in our classrooms, where we combine the tickets and draw out students’ names each week. This is especially fun when we have a K-8 assembly and can recognize students from all our classes as a K-8 school family. If you are ever around, you might even hear us chant, “I am an eagle, watch me soar. We are eagles, we stand for: Safe, On Task, Appropriate, Respectful!” You might also see our converted trophy case prominently displaying our CVA eagle nest on an ever-growing bed of SOAR tickets as we continue to see students’ positive behaviors growing.
Implementing PBIS throughout the elementary and middle school has transformed how our building looks at behavior. Instead of thinking of it as something students should just know how to do, we now see it as another part of the curriculum that needs taught and reviewed throughout the year. Most importantly, it gives us a structure to positively recognize students and has put us all—teachers and students—on the same page.
We are grateful for the focus that CVA places on the positives: rewarding students for their choices, encouraging our team of teachers to explore additional resources and learning opportunities, and crafting an overall positive environment where students and staff alike pursue an uplifting relationship with God and each other. We love CVA. Here we SOAR!
Angela Heam is the 8th grade teacher at CVA and Jeaneen Erickson is the 6th grade teacher at CVA.
